Digital health technologies hold a lot of promise and impact in providing the needed services, facilitating trade and boosting economic prosperity, largely because their ease of use encourages people to purchase services, hence boosting trade.
In all of these, a key aspect that many digital technology founders miss is how opportune their technology is in gaining market insights to understand the populations they serve, and how that can tie in with the wider economy and national development.
To explain this further, this means that apart from providing services like healthcare and money transfer services, these digital technologies are a repertoire of key information that is valuable in shaping and informing relevant policy and impact. For example, consider an e-health platform that interacts with thousands of community members.
When service users use the e-health platform to purchase healthcare services, they provide some needed information, such as presenting medical complaints and demographic details, which when aggregated and interpreted meaningfully, can be used to understand the common medical complaints from a particular community, the healthcare seeking patterns of the community and the particular location in the communities where an ailment of interest commonly arise from.
The caveat here is that the technologies must not be created solely for the purpose of collecting data but should be aimed at providing needed services and in the case where data can be used, it should be used ethically and with the express consent of service users.
Now, the burgeoning growth of the economies of developing countries like Ghana requires a concerted effort to innovate to provide services, and to also make policy decisions based on sound policy, and this stems from having the needed information (data). Using the previous healthcare reference as an example, consider a community which has recorded a disease outbreak.
With the use of a telemedicine intervention to provide remote support, policymakers can ethically aggregate the data and use it to map out the locations which are recording the highest disease outbreaks and even identify the cause of the outbreaks.
It is therefore evident that a developing country like Ghana can use digital innovation technology with a policy focus to expedite its growth and development. This shows how instrumental the government and digital health founders are in promoting national development and therefore calls for collaboration between these two parties.
In view of this, it would be ideal for the government and digital technology organisations to aspire towards working together in properly understanding their population through the appreciation of the key and necessary data insights to drive policy. Both parties have a role to play in this.
First, digital tech companies should ensure that they align their services and aims, with not only services they deem profitable, but with those which align with the governments key working priorities in their area of interest. When this happens, it helps provide meaningful change and the innovations are designed towards gathering the necessary information that the government would naturally consider to be needed in making policy impact. A policy-misaligned digital technology service would invariably collect community and population insights which may not be useful for governmental policy.
Secondly, digital tech companies must work to ensure that they have robust data governance and information systems that would adequately capture good data, as poorly captured data cannot be transformed into meaningful insights for change.
Thirdly, the government must fulfil its requirements in providing the necessary infrastructure and support for the digital technologies to work properly. This includes infrastructure like adequate electricity supply in the country, competitive internet data prices and incentives such as tax rebates for digital technology companies which are doing impactful work.
Fourth, the government should also ensure that it identifies key digital health tech companies and includes them in the policy agenda-setting process, so that both parties can truly appreciate each other’s role and co-produce activities that would promote digital health innovation that would align with both parties’ priorities.
It has become increasingly necessary that Ghana needs to adopt an evidence-driven approach to accelerate its development, and digital technology, if utilised properly, can provide valuable data insights to provide the just-needed services to communities.
The author, Dr. Atsu Latey, is the Co-founder of MindITGH.
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